Readers blog: Funeral bell tolls for rural Ireland unless we fight back

In his celebrated poem, “September 1913,” William Butler Yeats condemns the ruthless manner in which workers were locked out by their employers, giving rise to a winter of poverty and deprivation.

John O’Leary (1830 –1907), an old Fenian, emerges in the poem as the antithesis of the greedy, uncaring, grasping employers of 1913. In the poem, O’Leary is a symbol of integrity, idealism and vision. The refrain used by Yeats in the poem has the haunting toll of a funeral bell:

“Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone.